Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage

Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage is the story of history's most famous ship told through the lives of its most fascinating passengers. The Titanic has often been called "an exquisite microcosm of the Edwardian era" but has never before been presented as such. Through artist and writer Frank Millet, "the Forrest Gump of the Gilded Age" we connect to Mark Twain, Henry James, J. Pierpont Morgan, and John Singer Sargent. Millet was also the man who made the White City white, as Director of Decorations for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. His close friend, Archie Butt, military aide to the White House, takes us into the heart of Washington political and social life during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft. The personal histories of John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim chart the rise of two of America's greatest fortunes. Lady Lucile Duff-Gordon, a leading couturière, escorts us into a world where high fashion and the English aristocracy commingle. Through these vividly drawn characters, we gain insight into the arts, politics, culture, and sexual mores of a world both distant and near to our own. All converge on the boat deck of the Titanic during the ship's final hours and we become witnesses to a heartbreakingly poignant scene where some survive and some do not. The final chapters recount the rescue of the passengers in lifeboats by the Carpathia and the trip back to New York with only 705 of the more than 2,200 on board. Some men who survived lived under a cloud of cowardice. Others left a remarkable legacy that leads us to art collector Peggy Guggenheim whose father died when the Titanic sank, or to philanthropist Brooke Astor, daughter-in-law of John Jacob Astor, and how the circumstances of her recent death became "the last Astor scandal."